Residential CPE suggestions

Any recommendation for a residential CPE that supports dual SFP uplinks (WAN) with either a routing protocol or a resilient Ethernet solution? Ideally, LAN port should be 100/1000 CAT5. I've looking at Mikrotik, Draytek and others. Looking something in a lower three-digit price point. Otherwise I might have to do a pair of media converters on a copper switch/router that can do it (ugly!).

Thanks in advance!

DJ

(No personal experience, but...)

Have you looked at the EdgeRouter Pro? 2 SFP links,
routing capability. http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax

I've used both the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter and Cisco RV042G.

The EdgeRouter runs a modified version of Vyatta that's incredibly
versatile.

The RV042G is your standard Cisco SOHO Dual-WAN router - it has telnet, but
is limited, and otherwise is solid.

+1, hands down one of the better platforms for the money today. I have 3 ERLites in service and I know the pro is obviously a larger more powerful version so you should have pretty good success.

I was also going to recommend the EdgeRouter Pro as it has dual SFP ports and the Vyatta/Linux stuff works quite well.

I suspect you will be very surprised with the quality experience. If you've not used Vyatta, it's very JunOS-like.

- Jared

I was also going to recommend the EdgeRouter Pro as it has dual SFP =
ports and the Vyatta/Linux stuff works quite well.

I suspect you will be very surprised with the quality experience. If =
you've not used Vyatta, it's very JunOS-like.

Does anyone have any practical experience with the EdgeRouter with a
largish number of prefixes?

http://dl.ubnt.com/datasheets/edgemax/EdgeRouter_DS.pdf

The "2 million+ packets per second" leads me to believe that this is
merely a highly optimized software based router, but under "Hardware
Specs" it specifically says "hardware acceleration for packet
processing".

I have no idea what's being accelerated since the "layer 3 forwarding
performance" specs for the FR-8 are 2Mpps (an 800MHz CPU) and the
FRPro-8 are 2.4Mpps (1GHz) which suggests software lookup.

Do these things suffer if you load them down with a full table? Or
a handful of firewall rules?

... JG

It uses a Cavium Octeon processor which does have dedicated HW packet processing. A moderate number of prefixes won't slow it down doing vanilla forwarding, not sure about 2 million though... I believe they have recently optimized some of the FW stuff to take advantage of the HW as well.

Layering services like FW, NAT, and tunneling definitely drops the packet rate significantly, but it is still capable of 100+Mbps at IMIX packet sizes.

I think there are a couple of in depth tests out there.

In my experience the ERL works really well for a $99 device.

Phil

It also has support for some type of ipv4 and ipv6 offload.

You could also go Supermicro, and build out a 1U with SFP/Copper
connections and put VyOS/vyatta as a linux based routing platform....

....going that way you'll be strictly CPU/software bound though (Intel
wrote up this interesting report:
http://www.csit-sun.pub.ro/~cpop/Documentatie_SM/Intel_Microprocessor_Systems/Intel_ProcessorNew/Intel%20White%20Paper/Integrating%20Services%20at%20the%20Edge%20for%20Intel%20Xeon%205500.pdfwhich
is no longer available on their site seemingly).

Totally built out you'd be looking at high triple digits (the SFP PCIe card
and chassis/motherboard would be your biggest hits).

It uses a Cavium Octeon processor which does have dedicated HW packet proce=
ssing. A moderate number of prefixes won't slow it down doing vanilla for=
warding, not sure about 2 million though... I believe they have recently o=
ptimized some of the FW stuff to take advantage of the HW as well. =20

Layering services like FW, NAT, and tunneling definitely drops the packet r=
ate significantly, but it is still capable of 100+Mbps at IMIX packet sizes=
.=20

I think there are a couple of in depth tests out there.

In my experience the ERL works really well for a $99 device.=20

I sent them an inquiry and they sent a friendly but fact-free response
so it is probably safe to assume that it is relatively good at basic
packet forwarding but the services will kill it.

... JG